And, in fact, everyone is right. I couldn’t tell the unseasoned, unsweetened yaupon tea from the stuff you buy off the shelves.

I’m not saying a tea expert couldn’t have told you what they were drinking. But the point was, yaupon tea certainly didn’t taste like the plant deserved that nasty name and legacy.

It needs to be pointed out that yaupon tea fanciers use only the leaves, not the berries.

It’s still my understanding that all holly berries are toxic, if not downright poisonous. So, please don’t mess with the berries!

How does she make yaupon tea? Dry and roast the leaves, and steep them in hot water. Just like you would any tea.

Yvonne says the yaupon tea is basically another green tea— green tea is touted as a premier health drink—and is easier on the stomach than many commercially made teas.

She even sells it at crafts fairs and other events.

Yvonne has become quite an expert at gathering edible plants from the South Milam County outdoor bounty and she doesn’t go far to find them. “The wild plants I eat and drink come from my own back yard,” she said.

She gathers, and consumes, such items as chickweed, shepherd’s purse, and henbit. That all goes in a blender and produces a healthy drink.

As I recall, myself and some of my fellow 11 and 12-year-old members of the East Davilla Athletic and Getting Into Mostly Harmless Mischief Club found a plant growing one morning in the middle of our revered sandlot baseball-football field.

(Our field was sort of, uh, unorganized. Third base was a tree. Did this present problems sliding into third? You bet it did.)

We decided it must be polk salad, so of course we had to eat it. None of us had any idea how to cook the stuff, but My Friend Who Grew Up To Be a Policeman said he thought you had to boil it until it got tender.

So one of us commandeered an old pan from his mom—our moms were used to us asking for weird stuff—and we built a fire in his back yard, put the plant in the water and watched it cook.

We boiled it for, oh, five or six days. It never did get tender. It just went from dry and tough to wet and tough.

Finally, one of my friends said he’d had enough, grabbed it out of the pan, shook it—back to dry and tough—and put it in his mouth.

It slid down his throat without much effort from him. We waited to see if he was going to throw up. He didn’t so we lost interest and went back to sliding into third.

I think Yvonne is having a lot more fun “eating natural” than we ever did.